the haunting of memory
by metaphorically-blue
Summary: /Nel Nnoitra/ There is a fine line between love and hate. /the crescent moon is bright tonight, and she tastes blood/


A/N: It is the Crack Pairing Fairy's fault. That's all I can say. (Because really, I despise Nnoitra because he is a _baby-eater_, and yet I write him semi-sympathetically while shipping him with le lovely _Nel_. What is _wrong _with that fairy?)

Oh yeah. Peripheral violence (come on, the word _Nnoitra_ should tip you off) and incredible shortness (for me, anyways), along with an overuse of motifs. Consider yourselves warned.

the haunting of memory

_uno_.

She doesn't know when it started.

It seems like it has always been, this combination of exasperation and despair, longing and protection, and she wishes that it would come to an end, that the bittersweet music would reach _el fin_ and her heart would thump back into its place below her rib cage instead of where it is now, somewhere around her throat.

It does not.

Instead, she is stuck between longing and despising, and wonders how this came to be so, how she could have been so foolish

(_she is Espada, she is warrior, she is red-handed and never lover, never friend, she should know better_)

as to start wanting _him_.

There is a fine line between hatred and love, and she, however strangely or unwillingly or unfortunately, has crossed it.

She wonders what it would take for him to do the same.

_dos._

The sand is sticky with blood.

Time has slipped away from them, and they have now fought for hours and hours, cuts adorning their clothes and chests, blood dripping from _zanpakutous_. He is more tired than she, but his pride is still intact.

As such, she considers it a good day.

It is a simple thing, really. He trips, still slightly off-balance

(_though he would never admit that he could be such a thing, not to her, because he is _him_ and she is _her _ and they are like oil and water, two things that will only touch, but never ever mix_)

and falls onto her, and they land on the ground that is sticky and pungent with the scent of their ichor.

Their mouths meet, and she finally learns what he tastes like.

Blood saturates her taste buds, iron and salt from sweat and tears, and she feels bitterness and sorrow, hatred and longing and _wanting_. It empties her, this want, this need for something that she can't give, and the taste of him burns her up until there is nothing left of her but an ache that spreads throughout her body.

He gets up almost instantaneously, cursing her to the waning moon above and storming away, fuming. She sits on the ground, searching for her soul, wondering whether he's taken it away from her and left her nothing but some ashes on the inside, abandoning her and leaving her dry and hollow.

Two days later, when he strikes her mask and sends her spinning, she puts her hand to her lips. Uncertain, she touches her fingertips to her mouth as the world spirals and he glares.

The taste of him still lingers when she falls to the ground.

_tres_.

During a dream

(_one of a tall lanky man with a snake-like smile, one with a sword curved like the moon whose blood flows over her hands and G-d, she can still taste it in her mouth and he glares and yet she feels nothing but pity and protection and pining towards him_)

she wakes up with the taste of blood in her mouth and chokes.

She shoots upwards, spitting into her hands, and realizes after blood red saliva covers her small fingers that she has bitten her tongue while she was sleeping. Her blankets are rumpled and messy and all over the place because of her midnight struggles with invisible phantoms. Whipping her head around, an instinct tells her to _look_, _keep watch, be careful and cautious_—but she sees nothing and no one, and she is awake and alone.

Peshe snores next to her, loud enough to wake the dead, while Dondochakka buzzes soothingly and she leans back onto the soft sand, her eyes staring at the sky above her.

The crescent moon is bright tonight.

Her small face crumples, and she lets the taste of the reptilian-looking man wash over her, feeling the taste of blood and bitterness, of salt tears and suffering, fill her mouth until all she do is swallow.

Lying on the face of the desert, she knows she will never be rid of her dream-man, not with the blood that fills her mouth.

Rolling over, she stares at the inky darkness, willing sleep to come back to her, trying to go back into the drifting that is dreamless rest.

But she knows

(_deep in her soul, because that is where she knows everything, like that Peshe and Dondochakka are her brothers, and that her mask wasn't always cleaved in two, and that she was once more than a small girl-child sleeping on the soft sand underneath the crescent moon, that she had once been different than this_)

that he will always haunt her.

_FIN_

Review for chibi-fied Nel.


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